Peter Biella

Peter Biella directs the Program in Visual Anthropology at San Francisco State University. He has made films in the US, Egypt, El Salvador, Peru, and Romania, but he works primarily with Tanzania Maasai. With Leonard Kamerling, Peter has produced many 'trigger films' that encourage Maasai to change attitudes about HIV. Their co-directed Maasai ethnography, Changa Revisited, which looks at a single family at both ends of a 30 year divide, won the Best International Documentary Award at the 2016 Astra Film Festival.

Vassilis Economou

Vassilis Economou is a freelance film critic, journalist and hardcore cinephile. He studied film criticism and documentary in Turin, Italy and he is an alumnus of Talents Sarajevo and NISI MASA workshops. His main interest is in the field of art-house independent French, Italian and especially Eastern European and Balkan cinema. He is correspondent and industry reporter for the European film portal Cineuropa.org and he is a member of the programming team at Tallinn Black Nights International Film Festival (PÖFF). He has also served as juror for various European film festivals.

Leonard Kamerling

Leonard Kamerling is a film curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. His films on Alaska Native cultures have won numerous international awards. Together with filmmaker Peter Biella, he co-directed Changa Revisited, highly awarded at 2016 Astra Film Festival. Throughout his career Leonard Kamerling has been primarily concerned with issues of cultural representation in film and the role that documentary film can play in eliminating stereotypes as it credibly translates one culture to another.

Artchil Khetagouri

Artchil Khetagouri is the director of the international documentary film festival CinéDOC-Tbilisi (Georgia). He studied at the Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. His graduation film Heritage premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2006 Artchil moved back to Tbilisi, where he directed the documentary Akhmeteli 4 and won the Prix Regards Neufs at the Visions du Réel Film festival in Nyon. In 2011 he has established the Noosfera Foundation, initiating and managing projects like ‘Cinemobile Caucasus’; the documentary training initiative ‘DocStories Black Sea’ and the ‘CinéDOC- Tbilisi’ documentary film festival. He served as a Jury member for several festivals: Dok.fest Munich, Docudays UA, Listapad International Film Festival, etc.

Réka Lemhényi

Réka Lemhényi is a film editor and a professor at the University of Theater and Film Arts, Budapest. She graduated from the University of Theater and Film Arts, Budapest, as a film editor and earned a degree in Theatre Science at the Pannon University of  Veszprem. She has worked on a number of features, documentaries, TV series and commercials. Réka worked with famous directors, among them Oscar winner István Szabó, Venice Award winner Jerzy Skolimowski or György Pálfi. She has won multiple national and international awards for editing. She is a member of the European Film Academy, as well as the Hungarian Film Academy, and has served on juries for various international film festivals.

Ionuţ Mareş

Ionuţ Mareş (b.1985) is a journalist and film critic. He writes film reviews, filmmaker interviews and festival reports, mainly for the online cultural daily Ziarul Metropolis (ziarulmetropolis.ro). He is co-programmer for the film festivals Anonimul (Sfantu-Gheorghe), Ceau, Cinema (Timişoara) and Romanian Film Days in Chişinău (Moldova). He wrote about great filmmakers like Bertrand Tavernier, Abbas Kiarostami and Béla Tarr for the special catalogues released by Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest. In 2017 he published a critical study about “Oslo, August 31st”, by Joachim Trier, for a film education program, “Éducation à l'image”.

Bill Nichols

Bill Nichols edited Movies and Methods, vols. 1 and 2, works that helped establish film studies as an academic discipline. He has since published over 100 articles and lectured widely in many countries. He consults regularly with documentary filmmakers. His Representing Reality (Indiana University Press, 1992) launched the contemporary study of documentary film, and Introduction to Documentary (IUP, 3rd edition, 2017) has become the most widely used introductory textbook in the field. His general introduction to film, Engaging Cinema, was published in 2010. It is the first introduction to film studies that integrates a study of film's formal qualities with its enormous social significance as a medium of representation and expression. His Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (University of California Press, 2016) touches on key issues in documentary film. He writes about film and other topics on his blog, billnichols.net.

Kumjana Novakova

Kumjana Novakova co-founded and directs the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival (Sarajevo). She also collaborates with several film festivals and cinema platforms, and teaches engaged documentary cinema at Béla Tarr's film.factory. Born in Macedonia, Yugoslavia, and being based in Sarajevo, she has worked in the field of creative documentary, cinema, and media arts since 2006. She combined social sciences and social research studies in Sofia, Sarajevo, Bologna, and Amsterdam. Prior to cinema, she has worked as researcher and teacher in research methods and identity studies, at MA programs in Sarajevo, Italy, and US. As an author, Kumjana develops projects between cinema and contemporary art exploring the interplay between identities, memories and the collective self.

Christophe Postic

Christophe Postic is the Artistic Director of “États généraux du film documentaire de Lussas”, International Documentary Film Festival of Lussas (France) since 2007 and the festival’s artistic coordinator since 1999. For 10 years he has been a workshop trainer for documentary screenwriting in Kazakhstan and Siberia, and an occasional speaker at La Fémis French Cinema Scool for documentary programme. He is a member of the editorial team of Tënk, the new French documentary svod website,while also working as a documentary producer.

Alina Predescu

Alina Predescu teaches Documentary Film and Cinema Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a graduate of the Audiovisual Communications department in UNATC Bucharest, and has obtained an MA in Film Studies from the San Francisco State University. She is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at University of California, Berkley. As a member of the Nomination committee led by Bill Nichols, she selected TV documentaries for the Peabody Award. She was a member of the Jury for the United Nations Association Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival in Palo Alto, California. Before emigrating to California, she was a film critic for the ProCinema magazine and worked as a Film History researcher at the National Film Archive, Bucharest.

Ada Solomon

Ada Solomon is a producer for Hi Film and the president of NEXT Short Film Festival. She has produced films that were presented and awarded at the most prestigious festivals, like  Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Sundance. Among her notorious achievements are: the Golden Bear award for CHILD’S POSE by Calin Netzer, the Silver Bear for Best Director for AFERIM! by Radu Jude and executive producing the film TONI ERDMANN. Ada Solomon is a National Coordinator of EAVE (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs), graduate of ACE (Faculty of Automation, Computers, and Electronics), is a member of the board of European Film Academy and in 2013 won the Co-production Award offered by Eurimages at the EFA Awards Ceremony.

Michael Stewart

Michael Stewart is the Founding Director of Open City Documentary Festival, London and Director of Open City Docs School at UCL, where he runs a Masters in Ethnographic and Documentary Film. Currently housing four Studios, this Masters provides training for nearly one hundred students in Cinematic non-fiction; Broadcast Documentary; Cinematic Reportage and Immersive Factual Storytelling (including VR). In 2018 UCL is adding a new Studio running a two year MFA to the suite of courses currently on offer. Michael is a trained anthropologist and spent a number of years working in British Television as consultant and then producer.

Corina Șuteu

Corina Șuteu is the founding president of FilmETC and of the MAKING WAVES: New Romanian Cinema Festival in the USA and co-founder of fARAD Documentary Film Festival in Arad, Romania. She is an international cultural expert with an ample career as initiator, coordinator, and leader of cultural programs and institutions, European expert and reviewer, trainer in cultural management and politics. She served as a Minister of Culture in the Romanian government in 2016.